Godzilla: A Fearsome Predator, But a Lackluster Story

Gareth Edwards big-budget reboot of the seminal kaiju series is surprisingly short on monsters. When the CGI creatures tangle, it's a sight to behold. We just wish the story was big enough to do them justice.

Godzilla, released today, marks the 60th anniversary of the legendary movie monster's first appearance in Ishiro Honda's 1954 Gojira. Having grown up watching Godzilla's earliest adventures on WKBS Channel 48's Creature Double Feature in Philadelphia, I was cautiously optimistic when Legendary Pictures tapped British director Gareth Edwards to helm their latest installment. It couldn't be worse than 1998's Godzilla, right?

I say cautiously only because Edwards only had one film to his credit: the indie feature Monsters, a post-apocalyptic disaster movie about a crashed space probe and the subsequent mutations it releases into the world. Made for a pittance, with Edwards creating all of the film's visual effects on his home laptop, Monsters was a DIY tour-de-force. But making the movie is nothing like bring Godzilla back to the big screen.

Would Edwards be able to pull it off? The answer is yes, and no.

While Godzilla's estimated $160 million budget allowed Edwards to assemble a first-rate cast, ironically it's the human element that's sorely lacking. Bryan Cranston, fresh off his power performance as Walter White on Breaking Bad, is the sole exception. Watching him deliver an intense, emotional performance, you feel that he could go toe-to-toe with Godzilla himself. But beyond Cranston, even the great Ken Watanabe (Inception) and David Strathairn (The Bourne Legacy) are given little to do.

Godzilla gets off to a promising start with a credits sequence that pays homage to the monster's Cold War origins. It then fast-forwards to 1999. Joe Brody (Cranston) is a nuclear physicist who, along with his wife and fellow scientist Sandra (Juliette Binoche), works at the Janjira Nuclear Power Plant outside Tokyo. A series of mysterious tremors rock the plant. Joe is convinced this isn't a naturally occurring phenomenon and tries to have the plant shut down, but he's too late, and Sandra must sacrifice herself to prevent a meltdown, and save Joe and their young son, Ford.

Fast forward again to present-day San Francisco, where Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson)—now grown and in the Navy—is returning home from his most recent tour of duty. But as soon as he unpack his bags, he receives an urgent call from Japan. Joe, who's been living in Japan searching for the cause of the plant disaster, has been arrested for trespassing, and Ford hops on a plane to bail out dear old Dad.

The tone of the picture changes dramatically with the introduction of Ford as a main character, and you can feel the filmmakers struggling to shift the audience's emotional connection from Joe onto someone who is essentially a blank slate. Taylor-Johnson looks like a leading man, but lacks the emotional complexity Cranston delivers in the film's opening moments. Even when father and son are finally reunited, there is no emotional reunion, or violent confrontation—or much of anything really, Just Ford calmly telling Joe to leave his squalid apartment and come live with him back in the States.

Instead, Joe convinces his son that he's close to the answer, and the two men venture into the quarantine zone, only to find that the radioactivity is gone. Joe and Ford are captured by security forces and taken to the ruined Janjira plant, where Joe is questioned by Dr. Serizawa (Watanabe), a scientist studying an enormous chrysalis that has been feeding on the radioactivity in the reactor core. Once again, Joe tries to warn everyone, but is too late. The cocoon hatches, emitting an electromagnetic pulse and revealing an enormous winged creature that immediately destroys the containment measures erected around it and escapes. This is a M.U.T.O. (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism), Dr. Serizawa says, and Joe's research leads him to believe another one is out there.

Finally, a nemesis for Godzilla is revealed. But sadly, after this point the film plays out like a super-sized version of Die Hard, with Ford filling in for John McClane. The USS Saratoga drops off Ford in Oahu so he can fly home to his family, but the winged M.U.TO. attacks Honolulu International Airport before he can even catch his flight. Only now do we get to see more than a fleeting glimpse of Godzilla, as he makes landfall and throws down with the M.U.T.O., complete with accompanying tsunami wave and perfectly timed EMP blackout knocking out power to the city.

Those EMPs may be a powerful weapon, turning whole cities dark at the flip of a switch, but they dull the action of the film, turing every clash between the titans into a dark, muddled mess. And that's when you're even allowed to see the combatants—Edwards has a nasty habit of cutting away from the action just as it begins. The only time we get to see Godzilla and his M.U.T.O. sparring partners really cut loose is deep in the third act.

That's a shame, because one of the ways that Godzilla truly excels is with its visual effects and CGI creatures. Edwards worked with two living legends: Jim Rygiel, who brought Middle Earth to life in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Star Wars's John Dykstra. As for Godzilla himself, the internet was quick to call him 'Fatzilla,' saying he'd been eating too many bon bons since his last cinematic outing. I like the look, though—I think it makes Godzilla look tough, like a bruiser. The two M.U.T.O. creatures are spectacular as well, especially for original CGI creations. They're gooey, jet black, and pure evil.

After the Hawaii attack, Ford requests to join the military task force tracking Godzilla and dealing with the M.U.T.O.'s, who now appear to be headed for San Francisco. It's here that we finally get a Godzilla explanation: Dr. Serizawa says there has always been an alpha predator to restore balance to the planet, and that the creature they are following—Godzilla—has awoken to deal with the threat that the M.U.T.O's pose to the world. But he never explains why a radioactive creature like Godzilla would hunt creatures that feed on radioactivity like the M.U.T.O.'s—and not the other way around—or why the military should maybe consider an alternative to nuking the monsters. The film isn't big on explaining its own explanations.

Edwards has laid some impressive groundwork here with the first installment of what will surely be a new Godzilla series. And he establishes his Godzilla as—if not a hero—then at least a benevolent force of nature. But this film's inability to develop its human characters—and willingness to hide its non-human ones—are mistakes from which it can never fully recover.

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